The Fix

Make your own ring light for portraits

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Using a ring flash or a ring light is a really great way to get a nice even look for your portraits and also, your close-up photography.
It helps to give a nice shadowless effect on your subject's face.
And also gives a cool halo effect in their eyes.
But traditional ring flashers or ring lights can be expensive, especially if you only just want to experiment with the technique.
I'm going to show you how to make your own DIY ring light using tools that you hopefully have at hand like a big screen monitor or a TV.
What you'll need is a camera that gives you exposure control.
A tripod and that big screen that I mentioned.
You'll also need to make sure that your monitor or TV can display an image on it.
Step one, download the ring light image from the how-to article on CNET.
Or you can make your own.
What you'll need is a black background and then on that you'll need to draw a white circle.
And inside of that a smaller black circle.
Step two: Display that image on your monitor or TV full screen.
Turn the brightness up all the way you can.
If the blacks start to turning into a bit more of a gray.
Dull the brightness back a bit and boost your contrast.
Set 3. Put your camera and tripod in front of the screen in the middle of the center black circle.
You're gonna want to crank up the ISO sensitivity to around 1600 or 3200 because you'll be shooting mostly in the dark.
Turn out all the lights and position your subject right in front of the camera.
So the ring light is providing all of the light onto your subject.
To position yourself, or the subject, you might wanna use the camera with a flip-out screen.
Turn on auto-focus.
And then take a few shots, trial and error, to see exactly where the light is falling.
The secular ring light works best for the most even look.
But feel free to do things like triangles, squares, any other shape you can imagine 50IYRingline isn't exactly the most portable solution out there but it's a great way to get bang for your buck with gear that you already own.

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